Well, it's so far again that we are here in the Philippines for three years as of today. Yes, we had to fly on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and that was on September 11, 2006 for us to move to the Philippines. We flew with Philippine Airlines, a nice flight I must say. We luckily were able to sit on the first row in the middle, so we had lots of legroom. There was a little old Filipina lady who sat next to us and she told us that she does this trip every year to see her children and grand-children in Vancouver, Canada, and we were complaining of long flights. She had to endure these flights two times a year, a 15 hour or so flight from Vancouver to Manila.
We also had our little dog with us and it was smooth sailing for this little monkey. They put her in the cargohold and we paid about C$300 (188 Euro) for her ticket that was actually luggage cost.
We stayed first in a two bedroom apartment close to downtown for a year, but after battling with 24 hour noise from trucks and a passenger train that runs behind the apartment building where it stops at 6:30 a.m. every morning with its horns blowing everyone awake, we decided to look for a place in the suburbs of Metro Manila, and now we live all the way south of Metro-Manila, namely in Las Pinas City.
For some reason, it feels like it that it has been 10 years that we live here instead of 3, because the enormous adjustment one has to make, as the Philippines is a very difficult country to live in for foreigners regarding settlement and adjustments due to a very different culture we have here.
There's much disorganization, unregulation, corruption and lawlessness, you name it, in every aspect of life, but one can only adjust to these things and understand its culture.
We enjoy very much the warm, sunny weather and cheaper life here and both our health prospered. But we surely needed to jump a lot of hurdels to get where we are today.
